Kicking off The Concordian’s sex column with a tumblr blog about women and their orgasms
“The best way to make sure you care about whether or not a woman comes, is to think of women as full people,” wrote a woman anonymously on a Tumblr blog.
Life is weird, and so are orgasms. Thankfully, “How To Make Me Come” exists to help us understand and embrace how all women are different when it comes to getting off. “How To Make Me Come” is not actually a how-to guide. It’s a Tumblr blog, but more specifically, a collection of anonymous essays by women detailing their relationships with their orgasms. Writers are free to describe their personal desires, experiences that have affected them and even their frustrations with their partners when it comes to orgasming.
Some, like the one that I quoted, are short, quippy, and lighthearted—less a set of instructions than a series of jokes at the expense of a self-centred strawman. Others are instructions. The first one, for instance, says “DON’T JUST LICK.” Some are well-written and some aren’t, some are challenging to read and some will make you cry, but each will make you think about things you’ve never thought about before.
There’s the woman who—from a very young age—came so often and so easily that she was taken to psychologists (#65). There’s many by women who’ve never come. There’s confessions by many women who were shamed by their partners into pretending to come, and one into pretending not to. There’s one by a woman who’s had sex with two people, one by a woman who’s had sex with an unspecified high-double-digit number of people. Some tell stories, some transcribe fuck-journals (#32), some are acceptance letters to “My Vagina and Surrounding Areas”—an outline of what will be “the greatest academic challenge of your life” (#58).
The blog aims to get people to treat each other like actual people. A recurring theme in all of the posts is the importance of communication and respect in relationships and in life. In the blog’s description it is stated that the creators wanted to “start a dialogue about how women achieve sexual pleasure; something that is often ignored, devalued, or misunderstood.”
You will recognize yourself, regardless of your own experience with orgasms, regardless of whether or not they’re female or male or nonconformist, regardless of whether you’ve ever even had one. Which is good, because I’m not equipped, biologically or intellectually, to talk about the female orgasm. Any questions should be directed to “How To Make Me Come.” Or to a woman you know. Or, if you are a woman, maybe to yourself. We can all learn from each other.
Give yourself a chance to know what you want and communicate it to others. Listen to what other people want and say, and respect them for it. In life, in love, in bed: everywhere.